Fancy XML or name/value pairs on save of data to SQL Server

Question

I have a classic ASP application for student grading with a paper (with an ID and a userID) that requires a grade and scores from several different criteria (criteria 1, score 1, criteria 2, score 2)

I wonder if I should put this in XML and push it into SQL Server as XML or convert the name/value pairs to a delimited string and just parse it out within the stored proc.

The data structure looks like this:

<DocumentCriteria> <Document grader="95" documentGUID="{B49654E7-9AF2-4B89-AF8F-5146F7CD4911}" graderFYC="5907"><criterion cnumber="1" rank="3"/><criterion cnumber="3" rank="3"/></Document></DocumentCriteria>'

Answer 1

Why not parse the XML in SQL Server?

That is:

1. use the XML to pass multi-row data to SQL Server
2. shred and store relationally

Of course, if you never need to query or search the data then you could store the XML, but then why store it of you won't use it?